Performatik 2019: Ula Sickle & HYOID

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During Performatik, the Brussels festival of contemporary performance or ‘live art’, WIELS proposes two projects connecting visual art, performance and architecture: a performance by Ula Sickle & HYOID and a video programme by Dan Graham and Glenn Branca.

Ula Sickle & HYOIDVoice ascending a staircase (2019)

Ula Sickle presents an intimate, experimental sound performance in the striking, seven-storey staircase of WIELS. This is a pared down score for body and voice, performed by singer Fabienne Seveillac and dancer/choreographer Ula Sickle. This new commission draws from Sickle’s research – developed during her 2018 residency at WIELS – into the voice and body in public space, and gestures of resistance.

The work explores the body in movement, a topic that has long fascinated visual artists, not least painters at the start of the 20th century. One of Sickle’s starting points was Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway (1932), painted at a moment of uncertainty about the future of the Bauhaus school (closed shortly afterwards by the Nazis), while Sickle’s title directly alludes to Duchamp’s seminal painting Nude descending a staircase, No. 2 (1912).

Continuing Sickle’s collaboration with Hyoid Voices and composer Stine Janvin, this stripped-down work departs from the larger scale theatre pieces for which Sickle is best known. In this way, it responds to both the context of WIELS where she has recently spent 6 months and the framework of Performatik, which encourages artists to try out new, transdisciplinary approaches to their work.

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21.03.2019

During Performatik, the Brussels festival of contemporary performance or ‘live art’, WIELS proposes two projects connecting visual art, performance and architecture: a performance by Ula Sickle...
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